Hello, friends- by now we’ve all tried to process the passing of Leonard Nimoy, whose last tweet will surely go on record as one of the best of famous last words. There are some cultural icons whose death feels like a real marker of mortality and change and some hit harder than most. [An earlier example was Steve Jobs, at least it was for me.] Nimoy’s death is one of those: larger-than-life and yet completely personal. I’m sharing a few of my favorite links with you and I hope you enjoy. On a lighter note, this one about beginnings- Mad Art Lab just turned four and, simultaneously, some very enterprising people here have started Mad Art Cast. You can subscribe to your favorite podcatcher here. Oh, you guys? One more thing. LLAP.

from the page
Critic and video essayist Matt Zoller Seitz muses on the appeal of Mr. Spock, the duality of man, all that stuff.

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The Seattle Public Library is the record setter:Book Domino Chain World Record
{via Jon D.}

from the page

The Seattle Public Library launched the 2013 Summer Reading Program by setting a new world record for the longest book domino chain!

The books used to make this domino chain were either donated or are out of date and no longer in the library’s collection. They are now being sold by the Friends of Seattle Public Library to help raise money for library programs and services.

No books were harmed during the filming of this video.

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Featured image is one of the many images from the #SciArt tweet storm timeline Spider Sexy Dance by Christine Fleming.

Hello friends, readers, lovers, lurkers and other human-ish beings. Yesterday, March 1st, 2015 was our 4th birthday. And today we have declared a Monday holiday so that you can stay home from work and celebrate with us. Offices, banks and schools around the world are closed. Mail is not being delivered, garbage pickup is suspended. We have done this so that we can all enjoy each others’ company and do what we love best: Look at the internet, drunk, pants-less.

I hope you are prepared to participate.

These last four years have been so much fun. We really love what we do here at The Lab – bringing you art, science, skepticism and geekery. And we love engaging with you. We love trying new things. That’s a big part of why we’ve started a podcast. As you may have leaned earlier today, we are launching Mad Art Cast. You can find it here, there and everywhere. We truly hope this can be an extension of what we do here and a way for you all to get to know us better.

So wherever you are, whoever you are with, please sing Happy Birthday to Mad Art Lab. Out loud. Go on. We’ll do it together.

From all of us at The Lab, thank you so much for reading, chatting, tweeting and otherwise coming along for the ride with us.

Big news! The crew here at Mad Art Lab have started a podcast! Mad Art Cast is available by clicking the link below, or by connecting to your favorite podcatcher here!

Mad Art Cast features Amy Davis Roth as our host, with Ashley Hamer, Brian George and me rounding out the voices. Similar to this blog itself, our discussions are at the intersection of art and science.

We’re interested in hearing your thoughts, and we hope you enjoy the ‘cast!

The brilliant mind of Glendon Mellow from the blog Symbiartic has instigated what may be the best Tweet-storm of all time.

Starting today and running through March 7th. Glendon is encouraging everyone to tweet their favorite SciArt creations using the hashtag #SciArt. Anyone can participate, even if you are not an artist, join in by tweeting links to people you like that make science inspired art or just RT cool things you see in the feed. At the very least go be inspired by the wonder and glory that is being created daily when art and science merge!

Try to retweet at least 5 other #sciart tweets by other people per day. We are not policing this effort, so more or less is fine. Whatever you are comfortable with.

The goal of this is to share the variety and importance of art as it relates to science. By posting a huge flurry of tweets all in one week, we hope to reach an even broader audience. We hope you’ll be a part of it!

The internet is losing its collective shit over the color of this dress. It is, as most internet rows, a solved problem.

Some people see a blue and black dress, others see a white and gold dress. The truth is that this is clearly a terrible photograph that contain none of the above colors and your brain is lying to you.

In case you do not believe me, for some absurd reason, I have also included the same image with the colors sampled as swatches. Note the distinct lack of black, gold or white. The image is shades of faded blue, violet and brown.

Source: reddit

So why are people seeing different colors. The solution that seems most likely that it is a variant on the checker shadow illusion that most of us are familiar with. The trick of the shadow convinces our brain, in no uncertain terms, that A and B are different colors.

Source: Wikipedia

The major difference is that in the above illusion, we can see the shadow, and in the image we have to work backwards from what we can see to sort out the lighting.

Our brain autocorrects for lighting. Most painters out there learn this pretty quickly, especially when painting landscapes. Trees are not brown, snow is not white, grass is not green. Depending on the lighting they can be any number of hues. Our brains learn these rules really young and work out how to determine the “actual” color of something based on the lighting.

Problems arise when the lighting is ambiguous, though, as in that photo. Is that a dress the is overexposed and front lit? In which case it is blue and black, or a dress that is backlit, nearly in silhouette? Which would mean it is gold and white.

Let me try to exaggerate the effect

source:guitar world (sort of)*

The actual dress was found on amazon and it is very clearly blue and black.

*This came up as a key result when I searched for “overexposed photo” I had to use it.

Every so often, I will forget that I am not someone who enjoys crafts. I’ll think to myself ‘sure, refinishing that cabinet will be fun!’ or ‘sewing is such a useful skill!’ and then hours of melodramatic cursing later remember that the type of patience required for tedious fiddly tasks is the kind of patience that I don’t really possess.

That selective amnesia was in full effect when I decided to teach myself lacemaking, and then, because of a massive amount of overconfidence, planned out about as poorly as I could have managed while still ending up with a finished piece.

To understand why I thought teaching myself lacemaking was a good idea in the first place, you have to know that my mom is amazingly good at any fiber art she’s tried. She’s done everything from sewing clothes to knitting to weaving. When I was a kid, the craft my mom was into the most was lacemaking.

How you make lace by hand is deceptively simple. You have a sturdy foam pillow onto which you attach your pattern, or pricking, for your piece. It’s called a pricking because, before you get started, you want to pre-prick all the places where you’ll be placing pins as you go. The pins are what you use to hold the threads—one piece of thread will be wound onto bobbins at each end to weight them down, and allow the thread to be manipulated around the pins. It’s more or less very delicate knot-tying. A lot of bobbins are spangled with pretty beads*, and when I was a kid I liked decorating them because I liked shiney things.

It was pretty easy to figure out which bobbins in my mom’s collection where ones that I’d decorated.

My mom taught me the basics of lacemaking itself when I was in first or second grade; in particular I remember making a snake bookmark. All of this I’d more or less forgotten about until we were going through some old file folders and my mom pulled out the lace giraffe she’d made using a drawing I’d done when I was four as the pattern.

How adorable is that?

In a wave of nostalgia, I decided that I’d take up lacemaking again. It’s a very flexible craft, and I liked the idea of making fancy collars for my shirts, or maybe a lace dinosaur. My mom gave me all the supplies I needed, an instruction book, and a pattern all ready to go that I could use for practice. I’d been able to do this when I was seven so how hard could it be?**

What follows is a summary of what NOT to to do when teaching yourself lacemaking.

A) Don’t get cocky. I was convinced I’d be able to just magically figure out how to do this by making the lace look like it did in the picture. I mean, that’s the point of a pattern, right?

For reference, here is design I decided to try, mostly because my mom had a copy of the pricking that I could use. Are you thinking to yourself”‘Gee, that seems a bit complicated for a raw beginner to start on?” You would be correct.

The first clue that this wasn’t going to smoothly was when I read through the instructions and I understood pretty much nothing. Even the introduction to the book assumed I at least knew the terminology, which no, no I didn’t. But I was not put off because I had the power of the internet, and after a couple of youtube videos on the basic techniques I thought I was set.

The setup.

B) Don’t underestimate how much thread you’ll need. The pattern I was using called for fourteen pairs of bobbins. Winding twenty-eight bobbins with thread took about two hours, and I was seriously reconsidering my life choices by the time I was finished. Also, it turned out that one pair of bobbins did a lot more movement through the pattern than any of the others, so I ended up having to splice more thread onto those bobbins about two thirds of the way through the piece.

It’s already gone very wrong, but I haven’t realized it yet.

C) Don’t pick a random pattern and just go for it if you want the end result to look good. Let’s be very clear here: I did not know what I was doing and the first several rows took multiple attempts before they bore any resemblance to what the lace was supposed to look like. This could have been avoided if I’d tried some of the beginner exercises in my book, but no, they looked boring.

I made it about half an inch into the pattern before I had to call my mom for help.

D) Don’t be too proud to call your mom for help.

E) Don’t forget to double check that you’ve started the pattern correctly. I had a fatal flaw in my setup that I didn’t notice until I was too far along to be willing to rip everything out and start over that caused the bobbin pairs to not line up as they should. Because of this. every section in the middle that supposed to be shaped like a heart has a bit where I just kind of made the pattern and hoped for the best.

But there were some things that I did during this project that were helpful! Emotionally helpful, anyway…

A) Accept that you are making the world’s saddest doily.***

The section that looks nice and dense, like cloth, is the section my mom had to totally re-do for me.

B) Contemplate why we invented machines to make textiles.

Finally starting to get the hang of it.

C) Give your project a name that is satisfying to yell. I called mine Nemesis.

D) Swear a lot. Slowly recover from your mistakes at the start.

E) Finish the pattern. Declare your Nemesis vanquished despite not knowing how to connect the ends.

The finished Nemesis!

Somehow, despite that when the thing was pinned the sides were equal length, the finish in NO WAY lines up with the start (note the upper left corner in the above picture). All I can figure is that I did such an abysmal job at the beginning that when I took the pins off the lace shrank.

I don’t know if I’m going to get around making more lace any time soon. On one hand, by the time I got to the end I’d figured out how the stitches worked with the pattern and the pins. On the other, it was really, really slow going there for a while, and the only reason I didn’t give up was that I kept telling myself that it didn’t matter what it looked like as long as it got finished. For any other project I do I’m going to have a higher quality standard which will make errors (of which I made SO MANY) even more frustrating.

I do think that this is an underutilized art form which could have some cool sci-art applications—lace molecules, anyone?–but those are probably best left to someone with a bit more patience than me.

—

*This is supposedly to help weight the bobbin, but the beads also tend to get caught up on each other so I’m not sure how much they helped. Personally, I think the spangles were more useful for telling the bobbins apart than anything else. I had enough trouble keeping track of which pairs were doing what as it was.

**Has anyone ever rhetorically asked this and had the answer be ‘not hard at all’?

***My instruction book calls this thing a paperweight. Perhaps you’re supposed to put the lace in something, like clear resin, when you’re finished? I do not know.

—

–Information about lacemaking from people who actually know what they’re doing!–

The Torchon Lace Workbook-Bridget Cook. This is the book I was using. I’m slightly horrified to see the Amazon description says this type of lace is “relatively speedy” to make. How long do the other types take??

In 1912, it was against the law to publish a book that contained descriptions of birth control methods. It was against the law to even expound the theoretical benefits of birth control as a general notion. It was against the law to put a contraceptive diaphragm into the hands of a desperate mother of twelve in an attempt to save her life from serial pregnancy. It was against the law to give a woman a pamphlet that described how her own reproductive organs worked. And while the majority of reform-minded women of the era turned to the suffrage movement as their primary outlet of activity, one looked at the sea of poor mothers, drowning in unwanted pregnancy, bodies broken but without recourse, and decided to make the relieving of their suffering her life’s work. Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), more than any other single individual in human history, is responsible for placing mankind’s reproductive destiny back in the hands of those who bear its burdens.

She knew of what she spoke. She was born into a poor gravestone engraver’s family to a mother who had been pregnant eighteen times in thirty years of marriage, seven of them miscarriages. And her family was in no way unique in Corning, a town that sustained itself on serving the local glass works factory, the rambling immigrant houses teeming with children sent off to work at age nine to earn just enough to not starve. Maggie Higgins was born in 1879, six years after the passage of a set of laws that had as their express purpose the perpetuation of this system of hopeless overpopulation.

In 1873, Anthony Comstock, self-appointed leader of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, made it his sanctimonious business to stamp out obscenity in the United States, and to that end crafted a series of laws, approved by Congress, to make it a crime to mail objectionable literature, or to distribute it. And by his definition, anything that mentioned birth control was an obscene affront to nature. Through his unflagging efforts, the Post Office was turned into a massive machine of censorship, refusing to deliver any periodicals that even abstractly hypothesized about the societal benefits of birth control, and anybody who distributed pamphlets privately on the topic was bound for as much as five years in jail. Women were to be kept fully ignorant of their own biologies, and entirely powerless to control their reproductive destiny. Thanks to the Comstock Laws, it was now legal for a doctor to carry out an abortion, but illegal for him to distribute an informational pamphlet that might have avoided the pregnancy in the first place.

Higgins saw the results first-hand as she trained to become a nurse in the late nineteenth century, treating the women wasting away from repeated unwanted pregnancy, and their malnourished children. Herself the daughter of an agnostic socialist, Higgins was disgusted with the role that religion played in smugly perpetuating this misery for its own gains, and her radical tendencies only increased with her marriage to socialist sympathizer William Sanger in 1902. The marriage forced her to end her nurse’s training, and the accusation of being an under-educated amateur in the health field would stalk her the rest of her days. Living in the heady world of New York socialist circles during America’s last great flirtation with a worker-centered alternative to the two party system, her association with radical authors, artists, and devil-may-care libertines opened her eyes to a new mode of living.

She agitated for workers’ causes, focusing at first on the economic woes of the industrial classes before coming to the realization that many of the miseries of the modern day world were ascribable to humanity’s lack of control over its own fecundity. Wars, famine, urban crowding, and capitalist exploitation all had their roots in our inability to limit voluntarily the number of offspring we produce. And religions, hungry for new followers, and companies, eager for cheap labor, and nations, desperate for cannon fodder, had all made it their concerted business to label the merest whisper of giving women control of their bodies as obscene and grotesque. In 1912, Sanger began her writing career in earnest with a series of articles, What Every Girl Should Know, for a socialist periodical. It advertised the desirability of promoting in a general way the cause of voluntary reproduction, without mentioning specifics as to methods, and even this vague mentioning of birth control was deemed too radical in the eyes of a government run mad on Comstockery.

One of the astounding things about Sanger, however, was her sheer resilience. No matter how many copies of her magazines were confiscated, how many of her clinics shut down, how many of her talks cancelled by weary Catholic-nudged local officials, and how many times she was dragged to stand trial for offering reproductive counsel to distraught married women, she only used the adversity to further what she believed was humanity’s greatest cause. Often times utterly alone, forced to fill out her Birth Control Review with self-penned articles written under various pseudonyms, the object of derision not only of the conservative establishment, but of other feminists who viewed her tactics as too radical and non-conciliatory, she gave every moment and every resource to organizing and re-organizing her movement, becoming a figure of only passing familiarity to her own children in the process.

For three long decades of slogging, all of her efforts amounted to a tragic pittance in the face of the titan she had sworn to combat. The Catholic Church used every weapon at its disposal to thwart any progress she managed by pure personal resolution to tear from the inertia of American prudery. Its close links with the police force allowed the Church to shut down her meetings and infiltrate her clinics with undercover police spies. Its lobbying might caused presidents to turn against their own inclinations to embrace birth control in order to appease this important voting bloc. Everywhere she appeared, priests railed from pulpits against her affronting of God’s plan, vehemently choosing airy doctrinal purity over actual human suffering.

Meanwhile, the medical association would officially have nothing to do with her or her cause. When she finally won the right to open advisory clinics if they were staffed by doctors rather than nurses and volunteers, she struggled to find somebody willing to ruin their career by associating with birth control. And as to her pet cause, the one for which she is most known, of developing an oral contraceptive, the medical establishment couldn’t be bothered. The money was in thwarting infertility, not inducing it. So, it was up to Sanger, and her financial benefactor Katharine McCormick, to find scientists doing promising research and personally support their efforts against the indifference of the larger research community. Sanger’s research into the problem revealed to her that the most likely approach would be a hormonal one, and that the most promising work was being done by Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock, the former of whom was teetering on the closure of his lab before McCormick and Sanger descended to rescue his work.

Pouring money and support into his research on progesterone as an interrupter of the ovulation cycle, and benefitting from the much more lax drug testing policies of the era, Sanger was able to unveil the world’s first birth control pill, Enovid, in 1957. Within two years, a million women would be using the product, and within a decade, the Supreme Court would strike down at last the Comstock Law that made birth control still illegal in states like heavily Catholic Massachusetts and Connecticut. Having spent four decades educating a reluctant and often ungrateful public as to their own biological interests, she lived to see the tool of a birth control revolution developed under her auspices to profound, if not general, acclaim.

In the history of birth control, Sanger is often considered as much an embarrassment as a leader. Her flair for publicity and organization, the uncompromising way she approached the power of Church and nation, and her need for absolute control all set on edge the rank and file who wanted to professionalize the birth control movement, to make it something less aggressive and more media friendly. Sanger saw her Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau folded in with the American Birth Control League (one of the umpteen organizations she had previously created and left) to form Planned Parenthood, a name she abhorred as reeking of rosy committee-born wrong-headedness. Many of her cherished beliefs became hindrances to the later movement, including her early advocacy of eugenics, a set of ideas embraced by most Americans at the turn of the century, and developed to such a degree that an admiring Hitler took over many of our more extreme (but shockingly far more common than we generally allow) practices for his own state. Whether she embraced it out of pure belief or out of a tactical need for allies in the struggling early days of birth control advocacy is an open question, but it remains a sore spot nevertheless, and the sense of “Sanger? We’d rather not talk about her” is still palpable among those branches of reproductive history that would prefer a less idiosyncratic past.

But without Sanger, and the countless symposia she organized, the tens of thousands of people she helped face to face at her clinics, the reams of pages she wrote tirelessly expounding the principle of female reproductive self-determination, and her commitment to an inexpensive alternative to the irritating, cumbersome, and ineffective diaphragms that had changed little since the days of the Egyptians, where would we be? She carried the torch when nobody else was willing, kept its basic principles alive through the unpromising days of war, and the heedless callousness of the Cold War’s incessant post-bellum breeding. The pill would have perhaps come without her concentrated guidance, but decades later, in other hands, and the push to allow open discussion of reproduction that led to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Comstock might have come deep into the Eighties, exposing another generation to the serial misery of wizened Victorianism wed to blind Catholicism. We can be who we are thanks to Margaret Sanger, who died in a retirement home, senile and in constant pain, just half a century ago.

FURTHER READING: Sanger wrote a couple of autobiographies, both of which had an eye towards propaganda and which routinely altered events (erasing the Jewish ancestry of her husband, completely ignoring her strings of lovers) to make the movement more credible. A better first book is undoubtedly Jean H. Baker’s marvelous Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (2011). Sanger’s quirky self-mythology is investigated rigorously but sympathetically, keeping in mind the demands of sustaining a movement nobody believed in against incredible odds over an entire lifetime. Sanger comes out an inspiring heroine, but one who paid a heavy price, and enacted a heavy toll on those around her, for her eventual success.

Good morning you lovely humans. We have a lots of links to look at together. So let’s get started before the coffee wears off. Onward!

You’ve probably seen the photography of Daantje Bons scattered here and there around the internet. Well here’s more, along with some of her thoughts about gender, conformity and stereotypes. (NSFW) – Via Amy

For her Masters thesis at the University of West Hungary, graphic designer Barbara Bernát created new designs for the Hungarian Euro. Each note features an animal on the front and related plants on the back. But the best part is that she worked in a security feature: When under UV light the skeletons of the animals are revealed. How rad is that?!